EMMETT Of The Unblinking Eye

 TOP 10 ICE COLD MOVIES OF ALL TIME!!!

January 30, 2004

There are few things better than sitting in Southern California in slightly balmy 61° weather on a Friday afternoon while Mr. Hewitt and the Generalissimo are bundled up at the Saint Paul Winter Carnival at -20°.  Sometimes a minimal travel budget is a blessing.  In any event, Mr. Hewitt's sad situation prompted a desire to examine how the cinema has dealt with particularly cold weather.  So here are my choices for the Top 10 Ice Cold Movies of All Time!!

	10.	Iceman (1984):  John Lone stars as a Neanderthal -- no, not a guy a construction site who whistles at passing women -- a real Neanderthal frozen thousands of years before while chasing a mammoth, who is thawed and revived.  Timothy Hutton, Lindsay Crouch and David Strathairn play the scientists trying to study him.  Not a great movie, but the star was definitely cold.
	9.	Alive (1993): What do you do when the plane carrying your Uruguayan rugby team crashes in the Andes, leaving many dead but quite a few survivors?  If you plan on surviving, bon appetite!  Starring Ethan Hawke and Vincent Spano.
	8	Grumpy Old Men (1993):  Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Ann-Margret and a wonderfully cantankerous (and foul-mouthed) Burgess Meredith star in what may be the quintessential Saint Paul movie.  Ice fishing, snowmobiling, and more laughs than most present films can muster.
	7	A Simple Plan (1998):  Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton play two brothers who find a bag of millions in a plane which has crashed during a snow storm.  But who flies around in a plane with a million bucks?  A very good heist movie.
	6	Ice Age (2002):  One of the better animated movies of the last few years.  Manfred the mammoth (voiced by Ray Romano) leads a pack of ice age critters north against the tide in an attempt to reunite an abandoned baby with its father.  Think they can do it?
	5	The Thing from Another World (1951):  One of the better 1950's science fiction movies traces the plight of a group of scientists, lead by Kenneth Tobey, who unearth a giant carrot played by James Arness in one of his early roles.  For a much more gory version that is much closer to the original story, you might also want to look at John Carpenter's 1982 version, The Thing.
	4	Star Wars - Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back (1980):  Except for Minnesota, there's no place colder than Toth.  The opening scene in which Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is captured by the Wampa snow beast and rescued by Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is grand.  And it teaches a valuable lesson -- never go to Minnesota without a tauntaun.
	3	The Shining (1980):  Jack Nicholson in his creepiest role as a frustrate author who takes his wife and son to an old, snowbound Colorado hotel for a winter's worth of writing.  And other things. A very creepy movie directed by Stanley Kubrick.
	2	Fargo (1996):  One of the better Coen Brothers movies follows the travails of a very pregnant sheriff, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) as she tries to solve a series of seemingly unconnected crimes.  William H. Macy is wonderful as the dishonest and inept car dealer.
	1	Doctor Zhivago (1965):   Not even Minnesota is as cold as Russia in the winter.  Omar Shariff and Julie Christie star In this Best Picture winner about the travails of a doctor/poet in the Bolshevik revolution.

 One degree short of hypothermia: